Fleet Week with Vapi - Recap

Vapi hosted more than 30 voice AI builders on a chartered yacht in San Francisco Bay during Fleet Week, using an unconventional event format to encourage deeper conversations through talks, fireside chats, and a technical workshop with Deepgram, Kouper Health, and Coval. Discussions centered on speech-to-speech systems such as GPT Live, which can reduce latency and make exchanges feel more fluid but may limit control over terminology and scripted interactions compared with conventional speech-to-text and text-to-speech pipelines. Participants emphasized that voice AI development is increasingly focused on natural user experience, including backchanneling, perceived latency, interruption handling, and methods for measuring conversational quality, while interest is growing in embedding voice functions directly into web and mobile applications. Enterprise teams discussed the tradeoff between proprietary voice stacks and platforms that reduce the long-term burden of managing model providers, reliability, and failover systems, with contact center migrations identified as a practical sales opportunity. Vapi reported that the shared boat setting prompted conversations less common at standard conferences and invited attendees to VapiCon 2026 in San Francisco on November 11–12.

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